Steel Magnolias

Robert Harling wrote the play in about ten days after his sister, Susan Harling Robinson, died in 1985 from complications of type 1 diabetes. He wrote the screenplay too, his first produced one, and Julia Roberts played the character based on his sister. Herbert Ross directed the film in Natchitoches from 12 July to early September 1988, with former mayor and local historian Robert DeBlieux as adviser. Tri-Star released it on 15 November 1989. The house where much of it was shot is now a six-suite bed and breakfast.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — steps away
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 0.2 mi
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 8.1 mi
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 12 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.

More markers nearby

• Northwestern State University — steps away
• Old Normal Hill — steps away
• Dr. John Sibley — 0.2 mi
• Prudhomme-Rouquier House — 0.4 mi